If you’re a Central Texan, chances are fairly good that you’ve seen Bernie, the dark Richard Linklater comedy starring Jack Black in the title role. I saw it with a friend a few weeks after the movie’s release and remember vividly the opening scene of Bernie’s return to his alma mater as a guest lecturer … on the process of embalming. My fellow audience members shifted uncomfortably in their seats and let out gasps of “eeew!” I, however, smiled quietly, for I knew what many of them did not: that the onscreen depiction of the process of preparing a body for viewing was spot-on.

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The post Stages of Death appeared first on The Final Acts Project.

Harvester of wheat
and planter of seeds,
the farmland
and the plow,
where her hands
touched soft,
cold earth
crumbling
through fingers,
the bearing
of flesh
that rose up
out of her,
rising still,
her children’s
children,
and then theirs.

I bow down
to my human statue,
my stronghold.
Sun comes down,
and the light
around her head
is white. And I, last
born, on my knees
before her, kiss
the bones underneath
the skin, the toes
that ache with year,
eighty-one peeled down
like skins
of island fruit,
each one bearing
sweet flesh within,
and the bitter pit
we all must come to.

This she plants again
and sees it rise, not
from window,
but from her place
in skies,
when, after years,
she will go on
living in clouds,
between suns,
looking down
on this ground,
where her feet stood,
planted.

by Marian Haddad

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Photos by Audrey Long, ARCOS Films
Storyteller is Bernadette Nason

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The post Death of my Father appeared first on The Final Acts Project.

William

I want to sleep in my own bed,
if you haven’t sold it at a garage sale.
I want the dog to come here
or better yet, can you take me home?
I want to sleep on the mattress
that only you and I have slept on.
I want music I love, not the MUZAK
that I pay for as part of the bill.

I want to sing a song without someone
in the next bed telling me to shut up,
telling me to keep it down,
I know I’m sometimes out of tune.
I want to eat a piece of cake and
wash it down with ice cream.
I want to look out the window
and recognize the trees.

You say, “You’ll be alright,” as if
you think you can fool me,
as if that makes it easier for you
to get through this disease.
If I could speak, I’d tell you:
death in here is not my last wish.
If I would have told what I wanted
for these last days, before my brain
lost its way, would you have listened?
If I could remember my way,
I’d follow the FOR SALE signs home.

Al

This is not how I imagined it, in bed, wrapped
in a blanket like a mummy, without memory,
without a health directive, without my hair
combed, without my dress shoes polished,
without my dress shoes on.

I was hoping for a walk down the street, no cars,
just a simple place to fall, like on grass, in my fine wool suit,
my shoes shined, and the look of tomorrow clear and on my face.

or on the dance floor, where the music of blood
rushes like the sea in my ears, and the love of my life
in my arms entwined in a Fandango,
thinks I’m getting fancy, doing a dip
as I lose my balance from the gushing secret in my head.

I told my daughter, I hope I die with my shoes on,
less trouble for everyone, but she thought I was joking,
she was just a kid, she didn’t understand
the advantage of surprise over helplessness.

No matter how much someone loves you,
they can’t stop you from dying, but if you have your shoes on,
if you’re lucky, they don’t have to choose a pair for your coffin.

This is not how I planned it. In this place, waiting
and wishing you could tell them to remove the food tube
from your stomach, the one that feels like a knife.

Lily

If this were home, dying would be easier,
even a fall down the stairs, descending
like a child’s rubber ball, bouncing and deliberate,
would have the grace of familiarity.

My arms flailing like tentacles, my veins
like indigo ink, calamari angel hair, al dente,
my teeth dropping to the bottom
of the deep blue stairs before I got there.

If this were home, flying would be simple.
I’d open the window, my night gown stiff
from blood, from old urine,
like stiff gossamer it would carry me

and I’d take wing with the grace
of a swan or a seagull at sunset,
my song, sounding, stretching, soaring
from familiar surroundings.

Alba

We all have a shadow box of objects
enclosed in glass
at the entrance doors of our rooms,
like relic boxes of the saints,
like the glass casket of mother Cabrini,
little coffins containing our former lives.
The aides wash us daily
like Neapolitans who lovingly cleanse the flesh
of their un‑embalmed dead, opening their coffins
six months after burial.
Our bodies breathe but we are embalmed
in a disease that breeds fear
and wonder.

I make the sign of the cross
blessing my art paper, lifting the brush
in my left hand before I place it in my right ‑
I am from a time when lefties were
forced to use their right hand, but now
it’s coming back to her.
That was a time when there was no name
for this disease, when people like her
were considered crazy or sick or lost.

I’d like to break the glass of my shadow box
and yell, Fire! and release my life,
now smoldering in the ashes of age.
I should have told you how I wanted these
last days to be, told you of my wishes for this
moment when all has been taken from me.
If I could, I’d run to the nearest exit
with all my regalia in hand
and pray to St. Anthony,
the patron saint of things misplaced,
for my soul.

Tessie

I really don’t like the color of this casket, brown was never my tone.
You know how I hate pancake make-up! Are you serious? Peach lipstick?

I’d never wear a dress like this, and what’s with the nail polish? Whose idea was that?
Wrong shade of hair color. I didn’t grow it out to white so you could dye it back to black.

I’d rather be buried in the forest with the animals that I love. Under a tree without concrete and steel. Beneath the sky, serenaded by the birds and the wind above.

I think I’d heard about this new kind of thing, called something like ecological disposal
of remains. Away to return to the earth, a cradle, where we become one again.

But I never told you, I thought you wouldn’t listen, I thought you’d feel I was weird,
and you’d get all depressed, then give your opinion, then argue amongst yourselves.

Now, here you all are leaning over me, loving me. Long overdue. Saying things like,
“She looks lovely,” while the room smells of flowers, a sure think that death has arrived.

I know you loved me, but you never really said so. So many things we never discussed.
And, it’s true, I loved you, but I was just as guilty of keeping it all inside.

Now there is no inside, its all out here, laid out on ivory satin with a diagonal ribbon draped in the open lid with the words Rest in Peace, like I’m some kind of beauty queen.

Here I lay, my legs hidden, covered with a half-lid, like a wooden blanket from the waist down, stiff, drained, and plumped up, like a blow-up doll with features painted in place.

I should have told you, or written it down, how I wanted to make my exit. I know
this fanfare is for you, you need this, but now I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go.

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Once again they’re alone,
like in the beginning,
only now it’s winter and
the backseat of their car
rides emptied, a painful
reminder of an early frost,
her last breath still resting
warm on their icy cheeks.

And now, but for the rattle
of a loose tailpipe
that always gripes over
the last frozen mile home,
there remains no hint
of a previous season,
though the animals
seem to know, bowing
their heads each time
the tailpipe announces
its return.

The post An Early Frost appeared first on The Final Acts Project.

I believe that “legacy” means capturing the essence of an individual’s life, the part of a person that will live on beyond death. Sadly, the full richness of a person’s life is often not on display until a funeral service, where an entire personal history is recalled by loved ones in a special ceremony. Isn’t it strange that often, we wait until someone has died to honor his or her life and give it the remembrance it deserves?

Because our society is often uncomfortable discussing death, focusing on someone’s legacy also may be neglected. No ceremony highlights someone’s legacy until that person has achieved an advanced age, is gravely ill, or has died. With our mortality in mind, it is natural to recognize the legacy of our dearly beloved family and friends sooner, as well as defining our own legacy. Certainly, our accomplishments and the way we act toward others convey our deepest held values and beliefs. But it’s often hard to describe a person’s legacy, the wake left by one life’s passage that continues to ripple outward long after the person has died.

Here’s where the creative arts can help. We may not all be artistically gifted, but we are all creative by nature. Creative expression has many forms: drawing or painting; decorating; building a handmade craft; journaling or writing a letter; creating jewelry; or making a collage, or a photo album. Some people can express themselves through singing or playing an instrument. The arts are a wonderful way to recognize the impact that someone else has had on your life, as well as to create something that expresses a deep desire within you.

One way I have tried to be creative in recognizing the legacy of my loved ones is by writing them “agape letters” (agape is Greek for love). In the letters, I have written those things that I would want my family and loved ones to know if they were on their deathbeds. Someday, they will be gone. So why wait?

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For me, loss has always been a phenomenon that is both simultaneously real and ethereal. There is this mystifying duality I must confess I’ve never understood very well. In my world there is the abstract, and then there is the concrete, where boundaries of loss are simultaneously sharp and porous, delineated and amorphous, here and there. It reminds me of floating bubbles – in your hand one moment and gone the next.

The last half of the twentieth century has slowly changed how we perceive and experience loss. Loss through death has been made less visible, less personal and less accessible for family members. New medical technologies, combined with society’s demand for cure and medicine’s promise to extend life, have collectively, perhaps even unwittingly, conspired to push loss into the remotest corners of our lives. We find it much harder to touch, talk about, and have some measure of control over what is an everyday possibility and occurrence. Loss as one of the most defining moment in our lives, and yet we are left chained to a culture of silence. This new reality does not represent the historical reality of our society, of any society. The chains are contemporary, and they are of our own making. My best guess is that we must all work together to discover the key that will unlock this silence.

In her final moments, my mother was a floating bubble. I knew it was a matter of time before she would simply disappear before my eyes. I could see it coming, yet I couldn’t wrap my grieving brain around it. I trailed her every move, I tracked her every breath. I kept talking to her and combing her hair while my brother sang ever so tenderly into her ear. I knew her bubble would not last much longer, yet I kept chasing it around the room. I also knew the world would fracture and swallow me up once she drew her last breath, and it did for a while, a long while. Knowing I could not continue to hold onto someone I loved more than life, I slowly realized that loss is not always bad thing to experience, or even a bad feeling to sustain. Loss has its own complex beauty, and it allows me to fill the void that once inhabited my mother’s beautiful bubble. In my heart, she still floats.

The post The Anatomy of Loss appeared first on The Final Acts Project.

Today, the challenge of American health care is chronic illness, for which there is no known cure. The goal of chronic disease management is to keep people as independent and as comfortable as possible. We strive to avoid acute flares, and the hospitalizations that often follow, because technology isn’t the always the answer. When chronic illness takes its inevitable path to the end of life, the goal is a comfortable, dignified death. Yet, all too many of us in medicine have allowed technology to put blinders on us. We see success only in terms of cure, view death as failure, and frequently insist on using technology far beyond its utility. The last thing health care practitioners should be doing as chronically ill patients are transitioning out of this life, is leave them feeling more wounded.

The practice of medicine involves cutting-edge science AND sound clinical judgment. When we do something without considering the long term implications for the patient, we fail the patient. Instead of just focusing on diagnoses, we need to individualize therapy, making sure that our actions improve function, comfort, and quality of life for that specific patient. Once we accept that CARE is as valuable and as prestigious as CURE, we’ll be able to stop using technology when it becomes an instrument of harm. We’ll realize that when we just STAND THERE, we’re still engaged in important activity. Offering comfort and being present is heroic, too.

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It’s ridiculous to think of breathing in, forever, never letting a breath back out again. But somehow, that’s often our mindset when it comes to life and death. We are enjoying the in-breath of life so much, we forget that the out-breath of death is required to make the experience complete. We forget that our lives have a start and an end point. Life seems to stretch out, on and on, and touch infinity – doesn’t it? We trick ourselves into believing that we really can take one long inhalation, and the time will never arrive when we must exhale.

We may be able to fool ourselves into believing that life goes on forever. However, the fact remains that our life is a cycle. We begin in a watery womb, burst out into the world for an unknown span of time, then take our leave. If we really could live forever, would our lives have the same depth of emotion and the same meaning? I think not. Life’s meaning is captured in contrasts.

I have a radical proposal: Death gives meaning to life. My death, when it comes, will be a gift, because it will illuminate the importance of my life. My life is not a permanent or unchanging event. My time here is precious! I wish more people acted with a mindfulness of their own mortality. Perhaps we would spend less time on petty bickering, or on unimportant activities. Maybe we would be more openly affectionate with our loved ones. We would put aside our differences more readily, knowing that there is only a limited time to achieve goals.

If you knew you were living the final days of your life, would you behave differently?

The post The Contrasts of Life appeared first on The Final Acts Project.